Information overload is a growing concern as the amount of information sources available and received electronically, for example, through the Internet has exponentially grown. People face the challenge of keeping track of numerous streams of information from a variety of sources, such as email messages from work colleagues and friends, news stories, status updates from networking sites, and changes to shared electronic files, such as documents in content management systems. Each of the information sources can require visiting a different Web site or tool, including input of a separate username and password to access each source.
As the popularity of social networking sites increases, the number of messages transmitted daily also increases. For example, the number of tweets transmitted per hour via Twitter has already risen well above two million. Due to the number of messages transmitted, users are having difficulty reviewing all the messages received. Sorting through and reviewing received messages can be very time consuming, even after a short period of time away. The ratio of noise to useful information can be quite high as many messages received are related to social aspects, rather than substantive interesting information. The messages can include links to photographs, articles, or other Websites, which can include substantively relevant and interesting information. However, failure to review all messages can result in missing important or interesting information.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has developed as a way to avoid the time and effort needed to manually visit each information source individually. RSS is Web-based format for publishing content and allows feed reader applications to gather information published using RSS from a variety of sources and to present the information to a user for monitoring and review. The feed reader application regularly collects information updates from sources, or feeds, subscribed to by the user of the feed reader. Unfortunately, subscribing even to a few feeds can quickly lead to feed overload. Reviewing hundreds or thousands of feed items can be daunting and identifying any feed items of particular interest to the user can be lost in the noise.
Additionally, some information sources, such as the Facebook News Feed, provide a subset of information to the user based on recommendation filters to alleviate some of the information overload. However, the subset dynamically updates and when a user click through a particular piece of information in the subset to get further details and then clicks back into the subsct, the information stream has updated and the valuable information can be lost downstream.
Accordingly, there is a need for management of information streams that includes providing a high level summary of the information in the stream and highlighting the potentially most important information while retaining user control.